A few more thoughts out of my lengthy conversation yesterday with Band Pro’s Mike Bravin. Mike mentioned that several network people, including HBO’s Christian Wilson, whom I chatted with Sunday at the Digital Cinema Summit, have been visiting Band Pro’s booth, and others, while investigating HD and data-centric workflows for high-end broadcast shows, representing a philosophical transition from the typical tape-based philosophy regarding broadcast productions. This is the start of a broadcast paradigm shift for such networks, he suggests.

“When you say broadcasters, to me, they fit into three groups. There is the news and event broadcasters, that do mostly live or pretty near-live stuff. Then, there is the broadcasting entertainment–variety and sports type stuff. And then there is the dramatic stuff, like HBO does. I think the toughest transition psychologically is the people who are doing the cinema type stuff, because they are used to shooting film, doing a film workflow. For them, capturing data and keeping the data through the workflow is a lot different than what they are used to. The live event people, they use lots of devices to capture data and move it around. They edit on SANs with Avid Unity systems. So it is not as big a jump for them. And then, I think the news people, it is a matter of the media they record on. Once they make a decision about whether they are going to go to P2 or XDCAM, the workflow is kind of set up for them.

“So, I think the group this transition is hardest for is the group that has the largest amount of data, which is the motion picture production level stuff, like a series on HBO or Showtime. That is the question we’ve been getting the last 6 or 8 months from those people. Today [Monday], most of the people who are coming by and talking to me are that type of client. They want to see the cameras, and the Codex [Digital] workflow, and they want to see how this fits into what they do with film, how it’s different, and what changes they need to make.

“There is a lot of skepticism about the integrity of working in data. I’m not sure it is well founded. I think the high-end data recording equipment we are seeing, the background of these companies is from businesses that are a lot more important than making movies–the banking industry, and securities industry, where that kind of data is worth tons more than what we see here [in the broadcast world]. So, from that standpoint, the high-end equipment we are showing is really good.”

But, Bravin adds, there are also lots of affordable solid state, compact flash, and optical disk recording technologies being shown by various manufacturers at NAB this week that are “more than vibrant enough” for other types of applications, particularly for those doing news and ENG type work.

–MG